Ruling Culture:Tomb Robbers, State Power, and the Struggle for Italian Antiquities.

Nationalism;Italy;Antiquities;Cultural Power;Archaeology;Sociology;Social Sciences;Sociology

Greenland, Fiona Anne RoseGocek, Fatma Muge ;

University of Michigan

关键词: Nationalism;    Italy;    Antiquities;    Cultural Power;    Archaeology;    Sociology;    Social Sciences;    Sociology;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/108983/frose_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

Ancient artifacts and ruins are evocative symbols of modern Italy. Long subject to contingent valuations, ranging from hostility and active destruction to romanticization and ardent protection, antiquities are now fiercely contested resources for state power, scientific expertise, and cultural identity. Employing ethnographic, historical, material, and institutional methods, this dissertation shows how these domains of authority come together to constitute what I call cultural power. The nationalization of Italian antiquities offered a blueprint for other nation-states which sought to assert control over the circulation of ancient objects and ruins – key symbolic resources. The core finding in the dissertation is that cultural power is a distinct sphere of state power that is constituted by control over sites, objects, and practices but is not limited to the cultural sphere. Drawing on theories and methods from sociology, cultural anthropology, art history, and legal studies, I ask why the current framework for antiquities nationalization took shape the way it did, and what effect it has on the ways that people ;;know” the common national past. The reclassification of antiquities as state property was a crucial, early event in the amassing of cultural power in Italy. The 1969 establishment of the world’s first art crimes police unit (the ;;Art Squad”) extended Italian cultural power to repatriation practices, a key praxis in which nation-states’ heritage programs conflict and compete. A decades-long campaign against unauthorized excavators, known as ;;tomb robbers” (tombaroli in Italian) flexes cultural power at home. Cultural power also impacts nationhood epistemology. The confluence of science, state administration, and archaeological mysticism promotes a new mode of experience with Italy’s ancient past: indexical history, in which antiquities configure as quantifiable ;;wins”, as contrasted with iconical history, which narrated the past through select, sacralized images and objects. Key scholarly contributions of my project are clarification of the relationship between state power, science, and culture by transcending the traditional scholarly distinction between ethnic and civic nationalism; original ethnographic data that complicate existing scholarly views on looting and the illicit antiquities trade; and a material-focused agenda for studying the relationship between state and nation.